


Petals and Everything

by traceylane



Category: The Maze Runner (2014), The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: Angst, M/M, seriously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2014-10-12
Packaged: 2018-02-20 20:47:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2442626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/traceylane/pseuds/traceylane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>-Prompt: Universe where Minho witnessed Newt's death, and has to deal with the fact that he never confessed his feelings.-</p><p>That night Minho runs alone to the six-mile tree.</p><p>He beats the bark until his knuckles are bloody.</p><p>And he nearly bites his lip off trying to keep himself from crying out when he holds his hands underwater in the nearby stream. He opens and closes his fists, stretching the skin over the bones and imagining that the overwhelming pain feels like heaven compared to getting shot in the head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Petals and Everything

Minho sees ghosts.

They come when he sleeps. They’re faceless in the dark, but they grab at his shoulders and neck; they press down on his chest and squeeze his throat shut and whisper his name.

And when he gets up in the morning he remembers so vividly the feeling of being suffocated; he looks in the mirror and expects to see bruises above his collar, but of course there’s always nothing.

 

—

Minho stays awake for three nights before he tells Thomas.

“A ghost?”

“Yeah. And it’s going to kill me.”

It’s been six months in Paradise, as they and the other Immunes have deemed it. The two of them run together often, perhaps for old time’s sake, or perhaps because they could never bring themselves to stop.  But here they run up mountains, through grass, between trees; there are no corridors or dead ends or walls and when Minho runs here it feels more like he’s flying.

They’ve stopped under a tree they use as a six-mile mark when Thomas asks Minho why he looks like crap—more than usual, of course.  

 “Kill you? What do you mean?”

“I mean it literally puts its shucking ghost hands around my neck and tries to throttle the life out of me, Thomas. That’s what I mean.”

“I didn’t even know ghosts had hands.”

Minho throws a handful of dirt at him, and Thomas laughs before Minho grabs a piece of Thomas’ shirt in his fist and says, “I’m serious. Look at me.”

And from up close, the circles under Minho’s eyes somehow look even darker.

Thomas swallows. “They’re just nightmares, dude. We—we all get them.”

And Minho’s grip loosens, because Thomas is right. They all had bad dreams—they all woke up screaming, sobbing, from time to time. They all called out the names of people who weren’t there, not anymore.

“But not  _me_ ,” Minho says, “Never me.”

“Well, I think you’re going to have to accept the fact that you’re just not that exceptional, Minho,” Thomas says.

Minho shoves him, and Thomas laughs again before putting on his backpack and swiping the dirt off of his pants.

But he freezes when Minho says something else, so quiet that he barely hears it.

“What did you say?”

“…I think it’s Newt.”

Thomas flushes. “What are you talking about? What’s Newt?”

“The—” And Minho suddenly feels possessive of his homicidal night terror, “—M-my ghost.”

And Thomas looks at him with wide eyes. “Why? How do you know?”

Minho shakes his head, looks away.

 _That voice is his voice_ , he wants to say.  _Those hands are his hands_.

“I just do,” he says instead.

Thomas doesn’t say anything else.

—

The next day Thomas approaches Minho while he’s sitting at a table in the building they had constructed in the middle of Paradise, created almost as a tribute to their old Homestead.

“There you are. We need to send out another set of—”

“I killed him, Minho.”

And Minho had imagined, several thousand times, the moment when Thomas would finally tell him. He had prepared himself for tears, for shouting, for punches, and for this—a shaky confession in the middle of another busy day. They’re the words he’s been waiting to hear—wanting to hear—but they cut into him like a knife, anyway.

“I—I shot him in the head. He begged me and I… I didn’t know wha—”

 “I know, shuckface,” Minho says, but his voice breaks and he looks down at his hands.

And Thomas stares at him like he’s just escaped a whipping. “But—How—”

 _I watched you do it,_  Minho wants to say, but instead he says, “Go give these to Sonya,” and then gets up from his chair to shove a messy stack of papers into Thomas’ arms.

“Minho—”

“I’m not angry,” Minho says, abrupt, but as steady as possible.

“I just miss him.”

And he walks out into the afternoon sun.

—

That night Minho runs alone to the six-mile tree.

He beats the bark until his knuckles are bloody.

And he nearly bites his lip off trying to keep himself from crying out when he holds his hands underwater in the nearby stream. He opens and closes his fists, stretching the skin over the bones and imagining that the overwhelming pain feels like heaven compared to getting shot in the head.

—

48 hours pass; Minho sleeps for four of them.

—

The moon has only just faded from the sky when Minho shakes Thomas awake.

“Let’s take a run, shank. I need you to help me with something.”

So Thomas pulls on his shoes and follows Minho out the door.

—

Thomas asks three times where they’re going and why before realizing that Minho is just not going to tell him.

So he trails behind and almost knocks into him when Minho stops suddenly in front of a particularly dense layer of green.

“What? What is this?” Thomas asks.

“Slim it, shuckface. You’ll find out in a minute.”

And Minho pulls back at the foliage to reveal a small opening under the bushes.

They crouch and tiptoe their way through the damp, leafy tunnel that smells like mud and rain, and before Thomas can ask again where they are the tunnel opens up into a tiny cove where a slim flow of water pours down into the pool below.

“A waterfall,” Thomas observes, always the clever one.

“Barely,” Minho says. His voice echoes as he makes his way from the grass over to the rocks at the other end of the cove.  

“What is that?” Thomas asks, following behind.

“It’s a baby panda,” Minho says, pulling out what is obviously a carefully potted plant from his bag and setting it down in the dirt. “Now help me dig so we can bury it.”

So Thomas helps him find few flat rocks and they use them as trowels, setting the roots of Minho’s flower—“Don’t call it a shucking  _flower_ ,” Minho hisses; “It’s got petals and everything,” Thomas insists—deep in the soil.

Minho’s hands are shaking when he pulls something else out of his bag, a large round stone with four twisty letters carved into it. There are rough, shallow scratches around the harder lines where he missed with his knife.

Newt.

He holds it out to Thomas to put it down next to the plant, and Thomas’ eyes are wet when he takes it.

“Don’t you shucking cry, Thomas, or I’ll kick your shank ass.”

“I’m not,” Thomas says, but he takes a fraction of a second to wipe at his eyes before pushing the stone into the soft dirt.

And they sit down next to their tiny memorial with nothing but the sound of rushing water between them.

—

“I loved him.”

Minho says this the way he would say, “It’s hot out,” or “I’m hungry.”

So Thomas looks at him and says, “Yeah, me too. We all did. We all  _do_ ,” he corrects himself.

Minho watches the water where it splashes against the rocks at the bottom. “No,” he says slowly, “No, I mean I loved him. I really, really, loved him.”

And this is more words than Minho has spoken all day.

Thomas shifts towards him. “…You mean…?”

“Yes, I  _mean_. I mean I was  _in_  love with him. Shuck it, I was freaking head-over-heels, flat-out, end-all-be-all in love with him.”

Minho stands, picks up a rock that’s almost too big to sit in his palm and turns it over and over and over.

“I loved him so shucking much, his hair and his eyes and his mouth and  everything that he did, everything that he was, everything that he tried to be, and he  _tried_ , Thomas—Newt tried so shucking hard to want to live, and when he finally did he lost it all and now he’s gone and I loved him.”

“Minho—”

“He was my best friend and I watched him die, Thomas, and the worst part is I couldn’t have done anything about it. And it hurts, Jesus, it hurts because I told him we’d be okay, I looked him in the eye and told him we’d be okay and he always, always believed me—I told him all these shucking lies and I couldn’t even tell him the one shucking thing that was true, damn it _, I loved him_.”

“Minho!”

“ _What_ , Thomas?!” Minho casts the stone he’s holding across the cove. They expect it to fall into the pool but instead it smashes against the far wall with a loud  _bang_.

And Minho turns towards him, fast enough that Thomas cringes.

“I… I think he knew.”

“Knew? Knew what?”

“That you loved him.”

Minho stares at him before turning away again, picking up another stone and shooting it across the cove again. “You don’t know klunk.”

“Yes, I do!” Thomas says, standing up and touching Minho’s shoulder lightly. He isn’t shoved off, so he continues, “He knew, and he loved you back. The way he looked at you—what else could it have been? And…” Thomas stops, closes his eyes and swallows back something bitter, “he asked  _me_  to kill him. Not you. Because he knew. He knew that—”

“I would never do it,” Minho says flatly.

“Right. You would have never done it.” Thomas looks down at his feet. “And he would have let you get away with it, too,” he finishes, smiling faintly.

Minho lets out a short laugh. “He would’ve have let me carry him all the way to Paradise.” He tosses his rock, lightly this time, and it lands in the very middle of the pool, sending ripples through the surface.

“And he would have died anyway, a brain-dead Crank.”

Thomas doesn’t—can’t—respond to that.

The sun has reached a high point in the sky, and its light floods down into the cove, soaking the rocks with light.

Minho finally turns to look at Thomas again and ponders with his hand shading his eyes, “He knew, huh?”

Thomas smiles at him.

“Let’s head back.”

—

That night Minho’s exhaustion catches up with him and he falls into a heavy sleep.

For once it’s like his lungs open up when he feels that familiar pressure on his chest, and he inhales deeply, opening his eyes up into the dark, where no one is there and yet someone whispers  _Minho_.

“I miss you,” Minho breathes into empty space, and he holds his arms out so he can feel something, anything, but the only touch is from those hands on his neck, soft on his face.

_Minho. I love you, too._

And Minho feels the shadow of lips brush against his mouth and it sends a shiver through his body.

Then Newt is gone, and Minho falls back asleep.

—

It’s late in the morning when Minho wakes up. The others had decided to pity him and let him stay in bed all day.

He lies on his back and stares up at the ceiling, taking in the light peeking into the room through the cracks under the door and the rips and holes in his makeshift curtains.

It feels like he’s been sleeping for weeks, and the foggy feeling of rest fills him with relief.

And so Minho allows himself cry.  

——-

**Author's Note:**

> ANGSTY MINHO is probably my favorite Minho my god. Also my first time writing Thomas, and I kind of liked it because he's kind of a puppy, at least to me. Thank you thank you thank you for reading ^^
> 
> Feel free to send prompts [to my tumblr](http://amazerunners.tumblr.com/ask) or wherever uwu I will love you and try very very hard.
> 
> (EDIT: Translated by Táo Cavallone [here at wordpress!](https://crazyfujoshi.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/tmr-petals-and-everything/))


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